What good does it do to celebrate Black Lightning's 50th anniversary with the way it's co-creator is behaving?

Recently, Comic Book Club Live announced DC will be celebrating the 50th year since Black Lightning was introduced to the DCU, but what's sad aside from this being much too late is that co-creator Tony Isabella still insists on identifying as transsexual:

Wonder Woman isn’t the only DC Comics character celebrating an anniversary next year… DC will also fete Jefferson Pierce with DC Power: Black Lightning 50th Anniversary Special, a 48-page one-shot featuring a main story from Jenny Isabella, Brandon Thomas, and Fico Ossio.

“I’m excited about the special,” said Isabella via press release provided to Comic Book Club. “As the old lady of the team, I get to work with a bunch of talented ‘youngsters’ who love and respect my creation. Plus, we have an alternate cover by my pal Trevor Von Eeden, the first artist who drew Black Lightning and who is justifiably considered a co-creator of the character and his world. I had a blast returning to these characters. It’s a book that brings the action, the drama, the sense of peril, and the fun. So much fun.”

Another example of how Tony continues to insult intellects, and confuse anybody new to the products by otherwise erasing his background as a man. Does he really think it's that easy to overlook all that, along with how his far-left politics continue to overshadow and dampen the impact of his portfolio? On which note, here's an example from 2 weeks ago where he repeats his chillingly nasty attacks on conservatives:

If you vote MAGA, you are one of those maniacs. You are okay with crooks and pedophiles, racists and rapists,You think every immigrant is an illegal immigrant and deserving of brutality. You aren't concerned if U.S. citizens are arrested, beaten and even killed. Until it happens to you, of course.

You see a demented pervert tearing apart Washington D.C. because he doesn't think he will ever not be president and you don't care. You don't even care that he and his family have made billions by using his office for profit.

I don't know what's wrong with your brains and souls if you are a MAGA supporter. I know I don't want you in my life. I know that I will be secretly happy if bad things happen to you and, in some cases, publicly happy.

Love the queer people in your lives. We bring so much to this country and the world. Your lives will be diminished if we are erased. And, eventually, they will come for you. Because Trump Republicans will always need some group to demonize. Your fear gives them power.

All this from the same disgrace who hinted he was fine with the Charlie Kirk tragedy. And of course, he vehemently refuses to recognize that even LGBT practitioners can commit offensive crimes. Interestingly, over a decade ago, Isabella wrote the following about Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld, in the comments section of the otherwise awful Comics Beat website:

As a comics shop owner when the first issue of the original series came out, I complained to DC about the attempted rape. I pointed out that the heroine was actually an underage girl, which made it not “merely” attempted rape but attempted rape of a child. I was told that hadn’t occurred to the editor. Well, that makes it okay then.

I think he got it backwards: Gemworld was Amethyst's dimension of origin, where she was actually 5-6 years older. As "Amy Winston" in our world, she was younger in that mode. And Comics Beat, in hindsight, was trying little more than to create drama without even condemning Identity Crisis, where the topic of sexual violence was dealt with very poorly and repellently. That said, with the way Isabella's going now, he cannot make such cases so easily when for all we know, he could be trying to use actual women's bathrooms, using a protected class status to deny them the right to object. He throughly ignores some of the worst incidents involving men in disguise like himself, and then does what could be called borrowing a page from Hitler's playbook, if to use a description veteran actress Tovah Feldshuh recently did for her revolting co-star Adam Brody on Netflix's Nobody Wants This after he attacked Israel, and claimed the victim is the perpetrator. Isabella sure has abandoned a lot of reason over the years for the sake of his new path, and in doing so, he threw women's dignity under the bus, effectively making it impossible to claim he cares when he turns his back on cases like these.

Since we're on the topic, I discovered how the veteran animation and comics writer Mark Evanier is now talking about Isabella. If we were to refer to last year when this first sadly took place, Evanier said at the time:

That's a photo of my longtime friend Tony Isabella. We met by mail around 1967, by phone around 1968 and in person at the 1970 New York Comic Art Convention. Part of me is sad because there is no more Tony Isabella.

But this is not an obit. You see, that person is still alive. He's just no longer Tony Isabella…and here's where I get into what Daffy Duck would call "Pronoun Trouble." She is now Jenny Blake, having announced today that she has transitioned to what she feels is the proper gender identification for her. I've known about this for a while and as far as I'm concerned, the only bad part of this is the Pronoun Trouble it creates.

He then goes on to tell how some time ago, he knew another guy who took up transsexual lifestyle, and it doesn't sound like he ever argued that the poor guy was making a mistake. More recently, Evanier continued to talk about Isabella at June's Bill Finger awards:

Jenny Blake Isabella broke into comics under the birthname of Tony Isabella on Halloween 1972, being hired as an editorial assistant at Marvel Comics. The name Tony Isabella soon appeared as editor on Marvel's British line as well as their line of black-and-white magazines in America. Soon, it also appeared in the writing credits of various Marvel comics, including Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Ghost Rider, The Champions, the Tigra feature in Marvel Chillers, and It!, The Living Colossus. For DC Comics, he wrote Hawkman and co-created Black Lightning with artist Trevor VonEeden. In 2025, she came out as transgender as Jenny Blake Isabella, as depicted in her autobiographical story for the anthology comic, DC Pride 2025.

And then, in July, at Comicon:

...He used to be Tony Isabella, writer of many fine comic books, Black Lightning among them. Now she is Jenny Blake Isabella, writer of other fine comic books, her contribution to DC Pride 2025 among them. Last night, I had the honor/joy of presenting her with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing and she gave one of the all-time great acceptance speeches. I think I'll stay friends with this person for another 55 years.

"This person"? It's clear Evanier's beside himself, realizes this is something like Hans Christian Andersen's Emperor's New Clothes tale, noticing he amazingly has the audacity to acknowledge this is a "he" Evanier's talking about, but then, when it comes to the time Isabella decided to take an extreme politically motivated direction in February 2025, Evanier absurdly goes the Orwellian route and refers to Isabella from that point on as "she". Seriously, Mark's not doing himself or anybody else any favors by making himself look ridiculous like that, even if he is a leftist himself. I won't say Evanier's the worst of his kind, but with the way he's approaching all this, unable to take an objective position on LGBT ideology and Isabella's identity politics, it's enough to wonder if maybe Evanier would be better off working at a pretzel factory, because he sure is tying himself up in knots trying to make this sound logical, but only ends up twisting and turning all over the place in pure theater of the absurd fashion. I feel sorry for Mark in a way that he's doing this, because much like Isabella, I have to take even Evanier's resume with a grain of salt as a result, or separate the art from the artist.

Now, back on the subject of Black Lightning, Isabella also told the following:

The official Black Lightning creators credit is "Created by Tony Isabella with Trevor von Eeden."

DC approved this and agreed to refer to me as "creator" and Trevor as "co-creator." This recognizes that all the Black Lightning story elements were created by me before I pitched the character to DC.

Any previous published work by me is credited to Tony Isabella.

Any new work is credited to Jenny Blake.

I'm fine with being referred to as Jenny Blake Isabella in promotional material. I'm not fine with Jenny Isabella.

Which suggests he's continuing to try and erase his logical history and family name. What is going on? From what I noticed him writing of recent, it sounds like he's also distancing himself from the crowds he used to go with, and spending more time with the LGBT crowds, even as he seemingly still leads connections with folks like Evanier. Speaking of which, is Evanier okay with the disturbing tirades Isabella posted against conservatives and such?

This is one of the leading reasons why it's hard to celebrate 50 years since Black Lightning was first created, because the co-creator's chilling rants against anybody he disagrees with makes it difficult, and even before that, DC already ruined everything over 2 decades ago. It's really heartbreaking Isabella has to be this way, and additionally sad his buddies won't try to dissuade him from being so extreme. This is a prominent reason why comicdom's been devastated so horribly.

Avatar: Seven Havens cartoon pushes LGBT ideology

A few weeks ago, a writer at the Federalist said the most recent followup to the Last Airbender cartoon is pushing LGBT ideology on children:

Forcing LGBT ideology onto children is not a new phenomenon for Hollywood. So, it wasn’t exactly surprising when Paramount’s latest show for kids attempted to do just that.

On Friday, the company’s Paramount Plus streaming service debuted its new Avatar: Seven Havens series. Set within the Avatar universe, the animated show takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the avatar — who can bend the elements of water, earth, fire, and air — is branded the enemy. The program follows the journey of Pavi and Nisha, twin sisters who discover that they’re twin avatars and must hide their abilities.

Seven Havens is a sequel to The Legend of Korra (2012-2014), which followed the original (and beloved) Avatar: The Last Airbender series (2005-2008). Seven Havens and Korra are rated PG, while The Last Airbender is rated TV-Y7, according to IMDb.

Seven Havens introduces viewers to a variety of new characters in its three-episode premiere. Among these is Jae, a male airbender who serves as a guardsman on the bending force tasked with protecting the city of Ellora, where the series takes place.

The show’s LGBT indoctrination rears its head in the third episode, when viewers learn that Jae is dating his fellow guardsman Datu. In one scene, Jae is escorting Pavi and Nisha back to the city’s compound before he gets abruptly stopped and embraced by Datu. Seeking to protect the girls from potential harm, Jae quickly lies about their true identities before kissing Datu on the cheek as he leaves.

The Korra cartoon also had allusions to LGBT ideology towards the end, and if these particular cartoons are indeed aimed at children, it's enough at this point to feel hugely disappointed and disgusted at how Hollywood approached animation decades earlier, because arguably, it led to a whole situation in modernity where, instead of proving seriously that they can market cartoons for adults too, they exploit the whole medium for kiddie indoctrination. What's the use of even having a cartoon industry if this was all they could think of doing over the years, pushing the vast majority of animated TV shows and films for children while failing to prove they had the courage to build it up for adult consumption too. Of course, even today, long after the industry seemingly produced more for adults, they still fail to demonstrate the same kind of sophistication Japanese animation does. Then again, does anime's industry prove much better? They can be pretty crude and offensive too in their own way, sometimes even worse when they put acts of sexual abuse into their scripts for cheap sensationalism, which understandably damaged the perception of anime, resulting in a form of counterpart for the downside of modern USA animation.

For now, I think the whole Airbender franchise is decidedly long out of fuel, and the recent case of their DEI voice casting didn't help matters either. Perhaps if somebody could at least show the audacity to market for adults instead, then there'd at least be some justification for this nonsense.

Musician buys not one, but two Action Comics #1 back issues on the speculator market

Louder/Metal Hammer reports a drummer from System of a Down band bought not just one, but two back issues of Action Comics' premiere from 1938:

System Of A Down drummer John Dolmayan, who is also the proprietor of Torpedo Comics, a store in Irvine, CA, and the publisher of two comic books, Ascensia and Dead Samurai, has purchased a copy of what's been described as the "Mona Lisa of books": the first issue of Action Comics.

Dolmayan purchased the comic, which was published in 1938 and features the first appearance of Superman, for $825,000 – more than ten times the average annual salary in the US – and it's his second copy.

Earlier this year, Dolyman shared a picture of another copy, saying, "I dreamed of owning this book for years. I know it’s just a materialistic possession, but damn, it makes me happy when I look at it."

The drummer's latest copy of the comic was sold at New York Comic Con earlier this month by Metropolis Collectibles.

So here we have an example of somebody who not only makes a joke out of the medium by buying classic back issues he's bound to be storing out of sight, he even buys more than one copy of the same issue to virtue signal. And this can even give a clue why the NYCC isn't a good convention if this is what they're going to be party to, rather than focus more fully promoting the art form as ideal reading material. IMO, conventions have to move away from giving any backing to the speculator market, and sadly, that's unlikely to happen, even though distancing themselves from said market could do a lot of good for the comics industry's reputation.

Healthcare and the four color panels

The Scientist writes about how the comics medium can help convey the topics of medical care:

Nearly two decades ago, Ian Williams enrolled in a fine arts program after completing his medical education. “I had two sides of my career,” said Williams, now a physician at The Hove Practice and cartoonist. “I had the medicine and I had the art side of it, and the languages of those two worlds were completely different.”

Hoping to find some common ground in these fields, he signed up for a master’s degree in medical humanities at Swansea University. During this time, he encountered a couple of graphic novels about cancer, prompting him to choose healthcare narratives in comics and graphic novels as his dissertation topic.

He soon went down a rabbit hole and found other comics about cancer and mental health and coined the term “Graphic Medicine” to denote the intersection of medicine and graphic novels. As a hobby, in 2007, he set up a website reviewing some of the graphic novels that had medical context. “Putting up this website literally changed my life,” Williams said, explaining that people soon got in touch with him to share their own experiences of using comics for healthcare education or to share their medical experiences.

Today, his graphic medicine website—that Williams coedits—catalogs graphic novels that can help in education and patient care. Members of this online community highlight the role that comics can play in healthcare, with the discipline broadly including memoirs of illness, educational comics for medical students and patients, and much more. In addition to the online community, people involved with graphic medicine also hold conferences around the world, with like-minded people sharing their experiences of using comics in healthcare.

With increasing popularity of graphic medicine across the globe, experts have also highlighted the utility of comics to critique the medical profession as well as in patient care. Researchers even explored the therapeutic possibilities of this discipline, with some of them arguing that drawing can help patients resolve their chaos through creative expression.

It's just like various other forms of science, where researchers and specialists are recognizing how useful they can be as educational tools. I think it's great comics have come to be viewed as a perfect vehicle for medical research, and I'm sure it'll avail the medical industry in the future.

What would be the best tablet for digital readers?

That's what BGR is talking about, and why you shouldn't be fooled by a lousy one on the market:

There are several e-readers you can pick from if you prefer to read digital books. You can even use them to read graphic novels and comic books, but if you are looking to flip through pages of your favorite superhero, you may want to consider one specific Kindle. Especially if you want to read a comic book in color, there is only one choice among Amazon's Kindle e-reader lineup. The Kindle Colorsoft, as the name suggests, includes colors instead of the Kindle's typical black and white text and backgrounds. It's an excellent pick for comic book fans who wish to view their large collection of digital comic books on Amazon in color. Each page, spread, and sheet of the comic or graphic novel is brought to life through nitride LEDs that, according to Amazon, improve color and enhance the overall brightness of the screen so each issue mirrors its physical edition.

Amazon has a few options available for the Kindle Colorsoft, all at various price points. The starting price is around $289.99 for the Kindle Colorsoft. The Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition is around $319.99, with the Kindle Colorsoft Kids being about $299.99. There's also the Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft for a bit more at around $679.99. You may even be able to find a comic based on some great movies you didn't know were comic adaptations.

But there are some editions that don't always have the best color palettes available:

Some tech reviews found that the color on the Kindle Colorsoft may not be as full of life as physical comics or other e-readers. When compared to another tablet — specifically an iPad, which may be worth buying if you want louder colors — the color on the Kindle Colorsoft seems to be muted and dull. The color on the iPad appears to be brighter and much more vibrant. Still, you do get color on the Kindle Colorsoft for a lower price than the cost of a new iPad, which can start at around $449.

Which is expensive, but, as I've learned over the years, tablets can have important advantages, and if to read comics on them, they can come in useful, so you have to hope you can find the best operational tablets on the market for digital comics consumption.

But also, lest we forget, just like the tablets, you have to choose the comics carefully by merit too, because bad stories aren't worth wasting good hard drives over. Good stories are what make the modern technology worth it.

Large format comic by Liefeld actually makes it into the Guinness records

Guinness World Records announced what they consider the largest comic book ever published to date:

Comic book action is getting supersized, after VeeFriends' (USA) Gentle Giant character expanded into record-breaking proportions at New York Comic Con (NYCC) this 9 October.

Taking the title as the largest comic book published in history, VeeFriends Comic Book #22: Gentle Giant measured in at a colossal 7,312.76 cm² (7 ft² 125.48 in²), featuring dimensions of 106.6 cm (3.5 ft) tall, 68.6 cm (2.25 ft) wide, and 0.45 cm (0.01 ft) thick. That’s roughly four times bigger than the average comic!

On its own, that might sound flattering, but then, look who drew the cover of this allegedly record-breaking "masterpiece":

Produced as part of the VeeFriends entertainment and character franchise from founder Gary Vaynerchuk (aka “GaryVee” on social media), the record-setting edition had a special cover illustrated by Rob Liefeld, creator of Deadpool and co-founder of Image Comics.

Oh, for crying out loud. Why must they sully everything by bringing in an artist who's proven very poor in his track record? The figure on the cover of the huge copy looks as mediocre in design and awkward in anatomy as various other examples from Liefeld's portfolio, to say nothing of simply uninspired, yet they overlook at all that?

Maybe what the Guinness researchers should really be doing is producing a category highlighting the worst of comics artwork, because Liefeld's would make a great starting entry in the display, followed by only so many other examples in the past decade that were definitely unappealing as they were editorially mandated. For now, that VeeFriends would dampen the impact of the record by putting such an awful artist's work on the cover is dismaying, and the day will come when somebody says it's absurd they would make a mockery of what could've been a great entry in Guinness history by continuing to grant legitimacy to a bad artist who did no favors for comicdom years before, and has since been followed by other artists who, even if their takes on anatomy aren't as incompetent, are still very uninspired and the character designs are stunningly ugly. We don't need more like that, and publishers have to stop hiring Liefeld and turning perceptions of the medium soggy.

If Darwyn Cooke exploited Will Eisner's Spirit for leftist propaganda, that's disturbing and devastating

There used to be a site called Comics Bulletin, which was in operation until about 5 years ago. Now, it appears other sources in the UK have since bought the domain and put it to use for what's basically a new specialty site with a blog format. And here's one of their entries from over a year ago, which most unfortunately is leftist apologia for the post-911 era, and tells something rather eyebrow raising about the late artist Darwyn Cooke's run on the new Spirit volume from the late 2000s, adapted from Will Eisner's famous comics from 1940-52 by DC Comics, which apparently had acquired a license for it 2 decades ago, after Eisner's passing:

While not as well known as Batman’s or as colorful as Dick Tracy’s, like other masked heroes the Spirit has a long, well-established list of rogues. The differentiating factor, however, is that The Spirit’s rogues gallery is primarily made up of femme fatales. This is one of the few things the terrible Frank Miller movie got right, but even then it overlooked the most prominent of them all, P’Gell. From her first appearance in The Spirit Section #332 (October 6, 1946), she made an immediate impression thanks to her striking beauty, which Cooke gives a modern update in The Spirit #2.

Before proceeding any further, the character of Hussein must be discussed. Islamophobia was rampant in the post-9/11 world of the Bush Presidency. As a result, it would be easy for this character to be a racial caricature and no one would bat an eye. Given their introduction on the issue’s very first page, that may be the initial impression given. He’s smarmy and vile, but also depicted in such an unserious manner where readers feel he can be dismissed out of hand. But as the story unfolds, Hussein proves again and again to be a worthy foil to The Spirit – while also being much more than he initially presents himself.

The issue’s end when he and the Spirit walk off together in a Casablanca homage is Cooke’s exclamation point on this character’s inclusion – that the rampant and accepted Islamaphobia of that time was just as wrong as the offensive depiction of Ebony in the original Eisner comics. A welcome addition to The Spirit lore, Hussein would resurface throughout the duration of Cooke’s run.

First off, I don't think the Spirit was comprised "primarily" of femme fatales, even if there were several such notable characters there. It did have male adversaries too. That potential flaw aside, I can't remember if I'd fully considered it earlier, but if Cooke was applying a far-left vision to a comic originally created by a guy whose last GN gave focus to Islamic antisemitism as much as any other form...that's very disturbing, and easily worse than dumbing down the character design for a gal like Catwoman. It can also make one wonder if the focus on femme fatales in this new comic by Cooke has a different meaning to it than previously thought. And, lest I forget, is the character of Hussein an allusion to Saddam?

As for what's said about Ebony White, the writer - doubtless totally deliberately - obfuscated the differences between race and religion, and it should be pointed out that save for the unfortunate character design in the Golden Age comics, Ebony was depicted respectably and heroically, and Eisner himself wrote in his introduction to his Fagin the Jew GN some time before his death that he hadn't considered that the character design for Ebony was the same thing he took issue with when it came to antisemitic propaganda caricatures. None of which is brought up in the modern puff piece, and the writer should be ashamed of himself for giving his backing to a story that could've been written out of contempt for somebody who was more successful than Cooke ever was.

It shouldn't have to be pointed out that the writer of this puff piece insulted 911 Families when he wrote this retrospective, and provides no concrete proof to explain why disapproval of the Religion of Peace itself is wrong. I remember when the original Comics Bulletin site once posted a ludicrous declaration they didn't want to read Dynamite publishins any longer. Which was stupid enough, but now we have a new bunch that's turning even worse propaganda than their predecessors. And that's not good for the medium's reputation.

Dungeon Crawler Carl gets a comics series, and D'Orc comic gets a movie adaptation

In case it wasn't what was announced before when they previously reported about it, Variety's announced the fantasy novel series will be seeing a comics adaptation, by which I guess they mean an ongoing (and there's also a webtoon adaptation):

New achievement! “Dungeon Crawler Carl” is getting a comic series!

The popular fantasy, LitRPG books by author Matt Dinniman will receive an ongoing comic book series from Vault Comics. The double-sized, 48-page first issue will launch in comic book stores beginning in January 2027. The following issues will be released monthly.

The new comic will serialize the hit “Dungeon Crawler Carl” webtoon series. Writer Tevagah and Laurel Pursuit Studios, which provides artwork, will make the jump from the webtoon to the ongoing comic series. Artist Kuzomari also joins the series, which will have scaled-up art that fits the comic book page.

I know there's been some fantasy books that've been adapted, including Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone, so it looks like we have here another, similar example in preparation. But it'd be a lot more impressice than it sounds if they hadn't preceded this with graded variant copies. Again, that takes away from the better impact an announcement like this could have, and if it's only being sold as pamphlets, that's again a flaw.

On the other hand, Deadline's announced the comics series D'Orc will be getting a movie adaptation:

Sony Pictures has acquired live-action film rights to the bestselling comic book series D’Orc, with its author and illustrator Brett Bean attached to adapt for the screen.

The film plot is under wraps, but the comic book series marries swashbuckling humor with sprawling magical mythology and creatures wrapped in a gritty, action-driven fantasy adventure. Published by Image Comics, the series debuted earlier this year and became an instant bestseller Its first issue sold out before its release and is now on its eighth printing. Subsequent issues also have gone into multiple printings.

As yet more pamphlets, right? Seriously, I just don't understand why the creators want to do it that way, when here, they have a big opportunity to publish it as a whole GN in paperback or hardcover, and find more audience that way if it's sold in regular bookstores. Fantasy adventure can be great, and maybe the movie will be too, if they avoid being PC. But the opportunity to reach a wider audience in a format more appealing so far seems to have been all but missed, and that's a shame.